This blog post will examine the characteristics of the Kafkaesque world through several of his major works.

An Exploration of the World Beyond Rationality

Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 to a Jewish-German family. At the time of his birth, Prague was the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia (present-day Czech Republic) within the Austro-Hungarian Empire and one of the empire’s major cities. However, after the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed in World War I (1918), the Kingdom of Bohemia also faded into history, and Prague became the capital of the newly founded Czechoslovak Republic.
Prague produced many notable German-speaking writers. Among the most famous Prague-born writers of Kafka’s era was Rainer Maria Rilke (born in Prague in 1875). By the early 1910s, when Kafka first attempted to publish his work, Rilke had long since left Prague and was gaining international renown as a poet. While Rilke had departed Prague early on, traveling through major European cities, associating with prominent artists and writers of his time, and relying on numerous patrons, Kafka led a life in stark contrast. He was introverted, living in near isolation, rarely leaving Prague. He earned his living working at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute until his retirement due to illness, and could only devote himself to writing after work, once night fell. Furthermore, Kafka was very hesitant about publishing his work and promoting himself, so his worldwide fame was only achieved posthumously. As is well known, a decisive role in this process was played by his friend Max Brod, who published his posthumous writings despite Kafka’s instructions to burn them.
Nevertheless, Kafka shares with Rilke the reputation of being a pioneer of modernist literature, not only in his homeland. If Rilke exerted a broad and profound influence on 20th-century poetry, Kafka wrought such profound changes on the modern novel that the history of 20th-century fiction is inconceivable without him. Among the world-renowned authors known to have been distinctly influenced by Kafka are Camus, Sartre, Beckett, Ionesco, Robbe-Grillet, Borges, and Marquez. As their names suggest, Kafka’s influence extends beyond the novel into theater and even philosophy. Kafka is also an author who has been deeply studied and discussed by numerous modern philosophers and thinkers, including Adorno, Benjamin, Blanchot, Derrida, and Deleuze, in addition to Camus and Sartre.
Kafka challenged traditional notions of the novel and, while experimenting with new forms of writing in various ways, created a new world that people had previously thought impossible. The existence of the adjective ‘kafkaesk (German)/kafkaesque (English)’, which describes an absurd, fantastical, and grotesque atmosphere, demonstrates how distinctive and original Kafka’s fictional world is, and how profoundly that distinctiveness and originality have influenced modern consciousness.

The Judgment

Published in 1912, this novella contains significant autobiographical elements from the author himself. Kafka dedicated this work to “Miss Felice B.,” which of course refers to his future fiancée, Felice Bauer. The protagonist, Georg Bendemann, is on the verge of marrying Frida Brandenfeld. Kafka directly used the initials (F. B.) of his future fiancée for the fiancée of the novel’s protagonist. But that’s not all. Kafka was famously troubled by his relationship with his father. In the novel, the protagonist, after clashing with his father, is sentenced to death by drowning and throws himself into the river. Thus, his difficult relationship with his father is reproduced in the novel in an exaggerated form, mirroring reality.
A highly characteristic feature of this novel is its relative ease of understanding and rationality. The realistic first half (up to the part where Georg goes to his father’s room carrying a letter he wrote to his friend) is absurd and contradictory to the point of evoking an absurd nightmare. The stark contrast lies between the unrealistic latter half (where Georg is bewildered by his father’s unexpected backlash and ultimately throws himself into the river as per his father’s decree) and the first half. The first half is dominated by the figure of Georg Bendemann, a young businessman taking control of his life and advancing toward independence (marriage) and success. Yet lurking beneath this seemingly smooth life lies an element of unease. His independence and success mean his father and a childhood friend who emigrated to Russia are gradually pushed out of his life and into decline. This fact torments Georg, and because of this issue, he eventually writes a marriage invitation letter to his friend, then takes this letter to his father’s room. At that moment, his father’s counterattack begins. Claiming solidarity with his friend, who is declining in Russia, and with his deceased mother, the father condemns Georg and his fiancée in their names and sentences him to death by drowning. Georg passively submits to his father’s incoherent and often incomprehensible condemnation, carrying out the punishment his father has imposed upon himself. Georg, who in the first half of the novel worried about his father and friend being excluded from his success and facing ruin, is instead ruined by them in the latter half.
『The Judgment』reveals Kafka’s fundamental anxiety and fear about life—namely, his pessimistic notion that he could never settle into a happy, successful life as a normal civic subject. The novel expresses an excessive fear and guilt toward the father, the anxiety that leaving home would lead to permanent ruin, and the terror of marriage and independence—all of which are also Kafka’s own inner story. In this sense, Kafka’s dedication of this novel to Felice Bauer is significant. It seems to foreshadow their broken engagement.
However, a more general interpretation of the novel is also possible. If the first half of the novel represents the conscious world of a subject endowed with civic rationality, the latter half can be understood as an expression of the irrational, unconscious world that this subject seeks to conceal and suppress. What we witness in the novel’s unfolding is the process by which an absurd, frenzied, and fantastical unconscious world erupts from the weak links in rational consciousness. If the discovery of this vast new realm of irrational, impulsive unconsciousness—making the world of rational consciousness appear like the tip of an iceberg—was one of the most significant events defining 20th-century intellectual history, then it would not be an exaggeration to say Kafka was the first writer to provide a perfect novelistic expression of this new world.

The Metamorphosis

Where the downfall of the subject occurs at the end of The Judgment, The Metamorphosis begins with the subject’s downfall. The protagonist, Gregor Samsa, wakes one morning to find himself transformed into a giant beetle. Why Gregor’s downfall occurred, or what sin it was the punishment for, remains entirely unclear. Despite various differences, a fundamental similarity exists between The Metamorphosis and The Judgment. Gregor is not as successful a businessman as Georg, being merely a traveling salesman, yet he had nonetheless become the economic pillar of his family, nearly attaining the position of head of the household, and was at the very moment of solidifying this status. If Georg’s marriage to Frida Brandenfelt signified the culmination of his civic identity, Gregor’s plan to declare on Christmas Eve, before the gathered family, that he would send his younger sister Grete to music school with his own money, also carries symbolic meaning announcing his ascent to the position of a complete head of the household. Yet both protagonists fail to reach that point and instead fall. Georg dies after colliding with his father’s wall, while Gregor loses all his dreams by transforming into a bug.
What is crucial in The Metamorphosis is the opposition between the real world, governed by civic rationality, and the irrational, surreal world. After the novel begins with the sudden emergence of the irrational, surreal world (Gregor’s metamorphosis), the strange coexistence of these two worlds persists until Gregor’s death. Even after the transformation, Gregor’s family continues their practical lives, striving to maintain the appearance of normality by completely confining Gregor, now a bug (the surreal world), to his room. The same attitude is evident in Gregor himself. Gregor remains preoccupied solely with worries about the family’s financial situation, never once contemplating his own existence as a bug. His consciousness, too, represses the surreal world. Yet this repressed surreal world periodically bursts through the boundaries, threatening the bourgeois everyday life. Gregor, in a half-trance state, emerges from his room, horrifying his family. The surreal world in which the protagonist lives as an insect in The Metamorphosis resonates with the absurd, frenzied, and irrational unconscious world of The Judgment. Just as much as the dark room of Georg the father, Gregor’s room, deviating from the realistic world, also triggers anxiety and fear. Yet Gregor’s room is also perceived as a refuge, an escape route that allows him to transcend the dehumanizing, foolish, and tedious mundane reality—if only for a fleeting moment. For instance, the moment he decides to bring his sister, who is playing the violin before three lodgers who show no interest whatsoever, into his room, he envisions his surreal space as such a refuge. In short, Gregor Samsa’s irrational, surreal world appears both as a source of anxiety and terror threatening the civic, real world, and as a possibility of salvation that could transcend the shackles of this world.

In the Penal Colony

The conflict between the rational and irrational worlds also holds significant meaning in the novella 『In the Penal Colony』. This story recounts the execution of a prisoner in a penal colony. The colony has a tradition of bizarre and cruel executions. The prisoner must ascend a meticulously crafted execution machine without knowing what punishment was imposed upon him, nor being given any opportunity to defend himself. This machine is designed to inflict horrific torture by slowly branding the criminal’s back with needles over an extended period before finally crushing the prisoner to death. The penal colony’s brutal trial and execution practices face a crisis after a new commander arrives. An officer, who sees himself as the last guardian of this tradition, attempts to persuade a traveler to oppose the commander. However, the traveler, from the perspective of a rational, modern European, firmly opposes these barbaric customs. Realizing his time has passed, the officer halts the prisoner’s execution and climbs onto the execution machine himself, meeting a horrific end. The traveler departs the nightmarish penal colony by ship.
Reading this story, we can easily frame the conflict as one between the traveler’s rational, enlightened, humanistic consciousness and the officer’s fanatical, ignorant, inhuman consciousness. But can we interpret the plot—where the traveler, grounded in rational humanism, refuses to cooperate with the officer, leading to the officer’s suicide—as a victory of enlightenment over barbarism? Can 『In the Penal Colony』 be equated with the story of Iphigenia, who defied King Aeetes’ command to kill the stranger—that is, with Goethe’s humanistic, enlightenment drama (Iphigenia in Tauris)? It cannot. Because in Kafka’s story, the cessation of the barbaric custom is narrated in an extremely ambiguous manner. This ambiguity can be seen in the following points.
First, the officer’s death is realized in the form of the most barbaric execution. Paradoxically, the execution machine executes the officer who cherished and cared for it most. It is no coincidence that the officer’s self-execution leads directly to the machine’s own collapse.
Second, beneath the table in the teahouse visited by the traveler, the prisoner, and the soldier after the officer’s death lies the hidden grave of the former commander (the officer’s idol and the execution machine’s inventor). Significantly, his tombstone bears an inscription prophesying his return. When other patrons of the teahouse scoff at the absurd, anachronistic claim engraved on the tombstone, the traveler instead feels a sense of distance from such people. This suggests that with the advent of rationality and enlightenment, irrationality and barbarism cannot simply vanish or become mere relics of the past. The irrational world can return at any time. Modern rationality appears to eliminate irrationality and seize dominion over the world, yet irrationality is merely suppressed, never truly vanishing.
Third, the ambiguity inherent in the execution machine itself. The machine tortures the prisoner intensely with needles, but its function does not merely inflict physical pain. The machine carves the prisoner’s crime onto their back with needles, thereby creating an awareness of guilt within the prisoner. Only by reading their crime on their own back does the prisoner finally understand what sin they have committed. The execution machine passes judgment through execution. It is not the crime that calls for execution; execution produces the crime. In this bizarre inversion, we discover a world of inexplicable irrationality that cannot be understood merely within the context of barbarism and cruelty. It connects to the world of absurdity depicted in Kafka’s unfinished novel, The Trial.

A Country Doctor

Among Kafka’s works, the relatively short “A Country Doctor” is known as one of the most difficult and fantastical. Within this story, the realistic and the surreal, the everyday and the bizarre, the rational and the irrational, the sane and the insane are tangled together far more chaotically than in the works discussed thus far.
From the outset, the country doctor is in a state of ‘great perplexity’. He must make a distant house call, but bad weather and the death of his horse block his path. Yet, up to this point, we can still see him as a subject attempting to rationally solve the practical difficulties he faces. He sends his maid to borrow a horse to pull his carriage. But no one will lend him a horse. In his distracted state, he kicks open a pigsty door, and out come a strange coachman and two horses. At least from this point onward, a surreal, absurd, dreamlike world unfolds fully, and the country doctor is helplessly swept along by its arbitrary currents. Before this world, all the country doctor’s rational calculations are thwarted, for the essential conditions for rational subjectivity to function—the world’s continuity, stability, and predictability—have vanished. The country doctor flails about meaninglessly in the capricious currents of this bizarre world, like someone who has lost solid ground beneath their feet. The profound bewilderment he feels within it resembles the anxiety an absurd nightmare imposes upon us.
What kind of world is this dreamlike realm the country doctor has fallen into? It is a world where violent sexual desire and death impulses, horribly gaping wounds, magical words, and ancient sacrificial rites are chaotically intertwined. Within it, the doctor’s professional medical knowledge and skills—those of a modern, civic subject—become utterly useless. The protagonist, who at the novel’s start was tightly wrapped in a fur coat and carrying his medical bag, ends up naked at the novel’s close, mounted on an uncontrollable horse like an eternal wanderer. Now, even his home to return to has vanished. He laments that everything became irreversible after he was deceived by the nighttime bell and followed it out.
Clearly, the country doctor feels negative emotions and distance toward this surreal world that renders him powerless. Yet many passages in the novel suggest that this world itself is a product of the country doctor’s own unconscious fantasies, and the figures he opposes or distances himself from are actually his alter egos. The beastly coachman who rapes the maid Rosa stands in stark contrast to the doctor, who lived with Rosa for so long yet showed her no interest whatsoever. Yet this very stark contrast actually binds the two figures together as a pair. The deep connection between the two is strongly suggested by the fact that the doctor-narrator, who had referred to the maid using the neuter pronoun ‘es’ (it), only begins to use her name alongside the feminine pronoun ‘sie’ (she) when it first bursts from the mouth of the unfamiliar coachman. In a similar sense, the old doctor who treats illness and the boy who bears a surreal wound and yearns for death also form a pair. The boy carries a surreal pink (rosa) wound on his waist, linking the doctor’s erotic desire for Rosa with the boy’s death-driven impulse. Thus, the irrational, surreal, and dreamlike world depicted in “A Country Doctor” expresses not only the irrational anxieties and fears that the rational subject seeks to repress and overcome, but also the instinctual impulses hidden beneath that subject, and furthermore, the subject’s desire for self-destruction. The ambivalence of the irrational, surreal world we observed in The Metamorphosis is revealed even more clearly here.

Before the Law

Kafka included this short story in the collection A Country Doctor and also inserted it into his unfinished novel The Trial. The story features only two characters: a man from the country and the gatekeeper who guards the law. The man from the country spends his entire life attempting to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper repeatedly refuses entry, saying that entry will be possible later, but not now. And when the man is on the verge of death, the gatekeeper reveals that this entrance was intended solely for the man. With the man’s death, the gatekeeper is freed from his duty, and the entrance is closed.
The Law and the gatekeeper guarding its entrance present an unsolvable enigma. Why did the gatekeeper never permit the man to enter? Why, instead of simply turning him away, did he entice him with the promise of eventual entry? If the gatekeeper was never going to let the man in, and if, as he claimed, the entrance was designated solely for the man so that no one else would attempt to enter, why didn’t the gatekeeper simply seal the entrance from the start? Why did he keep the gate open, unable to leave his post for all those long years, sparing no effort to block the man’s entry? Why did the gatekeeper neither firmly reject nor firmly accept the man, instead adopting this contradictory stance—rejecting while seeming to accept, or accepting while seeming to reject? Wasn’t it precisely this contradictory attitude that ultimately caused not only the man but the gatekeeper himself to waste his life? For what purpose did the gatekeeper choose the path of never resting, bickering endlessly with the man, and enduring his ceaseless petitions for all those long years?
Equally enigmatic is the man who came up from the countryside. Why does he seek to enter the Law? What value does the Law hold for him? The man appears before the Law without end, pleading his case. The narrator offers no explanation for these questions: What kind of world did he originally live in? What led him to the Law? What did he intend to do once inside? Why did he spend his entire life obediently following the gatekeeper’s words and waiting, never once questioning the gatekeeper’s absurd attitude?
The absurd drama between the man from the country and the gatekeeper demonstrates that Kafka captures the human existential condition beyond the principle of rationality. The principle of rationality seeks to understand human actions and life within the framework of purposefulness, finding the orientation and meaning of human actions and life in reaching some predetermined goal. However, the limitation inherent in the principles of rationality and purposefulness lies in not knowing the answer to life beyond the goal once the goal is achieved. Paradoxically, a life that has achieved its goal, a life that has fulfilled its meaning, no longer possesses meaning. This is precisely why fairy tales, racing toward the goal of the prince and princess’s marriage, always gloss over the aftermath with “And they lived happily ever after” once the protagonists are married. There is nothing left to tell after the marriage. Life after the goal is meaningless. Since the meaning of life depends on goals, yet vanishes the moment those goals are achieved, a paradox emerges: what ultimately gives life meaning is an unattainable goal. However, if something is completely impossible to achieve, it cannot even be a goal. Therefore, humans require a contradictory goal—one that seems attainable yet remains forever out of reach. The gatekeeper neither completely blocks the entrance to the law nor permits entry, thereby offering the man from the country precisely this contradictory goal. The man breathes his last breath believing he devoted his entire life to the pursuit of the law. But isn’t a life that ends without achieving its goal ultimately futile? Even if the man saw some meaning in his life, wasn’t that meaning merely an illusion? Or did he know that the illusion of meaning alone was enough to sustain life, that one could not hope for more from life?

A Hunger Artist

In Kafka’s novels, motifs of circus performances or acrobats frequently appear. These works are generally interpreted as explorations of the artist’s mode of existence. In “The Report to an Academy,” Red Peter, a monkey captured from the Golden Coast, adapts to the human world and becomes an actor in a vaudeville theater. Red Peter succeeded in imitating humans and nearly became human himself through his own arduous efforts to escape the animal cage. However, in Kafka’s later work, “A Hunger Artist,” the situation unfolds in the opposite direction. The hunger artist’s performance takes place while he is locked in a cage. As the popularity of fasting declined, the performer was ultimately abandoned in the cage, reduced to an existence no better than an animal, or even worse.
Fasting performances actually enjoyed considerable popularity in America and Europe from the late 19th to the early 20th century. However, after several fraudulent fasting attempts were exposed, they lost credibility and gradually faded from public interest. The narrator’s account of fasting in Kafka’s story corresponds, at least in part, to historical facts. So why did Kafka take an interest in fasting and use it as material for a kind of artist novel?
What is art? Art is only recognized as such when an artist actively accomplishes something ordinary people cannot do and presents the result to the world. Yet in fasting artistry, the content of art lies in not doing something ordinary people do. This was also the cause of the many doubts and scandals surrounding the authenticity of fasting in the actual history of fasting performances. Showing what one did not do is no simple matter. Fasting could only be proven through constant surveillance.
This is a problem also treated as crucial in Kafka’s novel. The crux of a fasting performance lies in how the artist can show what they are not doing. Complete proof of fasting is impossible unless everyone observes the fasting artist 24 hours a day. Because of this, the promoter of the fasting spectacle focuses solely on creating the illusion of fasting. The watchmen are merely tools for creating this illusion. Even the 40-day fasting period is calculated based on the level of public interest in the illusion of fasting. At this point, how long the hunger artist can actually go without eating is irrelevant. To create a meaningful illusion, the hunger artist instead endures the humiliation of being forcibly stopped from fasting. The true skill and achievement of the fasting artist remain something that no one but the artist themselves can verify, due to the negative characteristics of fasting: its passive and invisible nature.
Paradoxically, it was only after the popularity of fasting art waned—that is, after the demand for the illusion of fasting disappeared—that the fasting artist could pursue their art truly, unhindered by anyone. But art that no one cares about and no one knows about can no longer be art. Because being exhibited and recognized by people is the very minimum condition for art.
The Hunger Artist becomes completely isolated in a world of art that only he himself can confirm, recognize, and evaluate. As a result of this isolation, he is ultimately pushed out of the human world and, like Gregor Samsa, starves to death in his own closed-off space. The Fasting Artist’s last words—that he fasted because nothing appealed to his taste—also strongly evoke Gregor Samsa, who died unable to eat anything because he had lost his appetite. The starving artist’s last words contain an aesthetic ideal of extreme negation of the real world. By adhering strictly to this aesthetic ideal, the artist will be completely forgotten and vanish from the world. Yet he can only be an artist when he gains the world’s recognition. When Kafka asked Max Brod to burn his unpublished manuscripts, he may have been acutely aware of the dilemma of modern art, which pursued the negation of the real world. Did he believe he should simply vanish? Written in 1922, when he was already gravely ill, “A Hunger Artist” can be read as Kafka’s literary testament in this sense.